It would be a tremendous overstatement to imply that this is the only reason that James Cameron’s Avatar has dominated movie theaters every weekend since the start of the year, but it certainly contributes a little. Everyone loves it when the industry gives that special stamp to something so blatantly designed purely for entertainment. However, the fact that this is considered a front-runner for the award is more than a little confusing. Certainly, the film beats any other film out of the park in terms of its special effects, but with a budget of more than half a billion dollars, is that really all that surprising? Fellow best picture nominee District 9 had a minimalist budget, and yet there really isn’t anything more convincing about Cameron’s Pandora than there is about Blomkamp’s Johannesburg. It deserves some form of recognition, and many critics groups have awarded it in many disparate categories. The Academy Awards, however, despite all the idiotic decisions they have made over the years, are expected to hold the greatest works of art up, insuring that they persevere long after the initial hype dies away. And I don’t think Avatar makes the cut.
It’s already going to be a strange year at the Oscars. This is the first time in decades where they have upped the number of nominees in the Best Picture category at all, let alone double it. The nomination of The Blind Side for Best Picture should be enough to convince people how ridiculous this is. Think back to all the slow years when the Academy of Arts and Sciences has barely been able to pull five films together. Sure, some films have been overlooked in the past, and there will be plenty more that will be overlooked in the future, but the exclusivity of these awards are part of what makes them a big deal. This is precisely the reason that the Golden Globes are never taken seriously, their system of having two sets of Best Pictures allows a great deal of mediocre material into the race.
I have two hopes in 2010 in regards to the Academy Awards. First, I hope that smarts beat spectacle in the Best Picture race, and that Avatar loses the award to one of the many more worthy films, like The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, or A Serious Man. Second, I hope they announce that their ten-nominees experiment is over, and that the Oscars can keep whatever dignity and prestige they have left.
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"Avatar" does not have Best Picture sewn up. In fact, it's just about the only possible "highest grossing film of all time" that has managed not to have that award sewn up by this point. I do not think it's a bad film. In fact, a second viewing convinced me it belongs in a very special category of movies that use CGI (and, of course, 3-D) technology so seamlessly that you stop noticing them after a while. This is, after all, the "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and SCIENCES" we're talking about here; part of their responsibility is to reward films that urge the industry toward new technological territory. So yes, a 3-D film with a predictable plot and a corny theme song will probably win Best Picture this year. That's not a disaster when put in context.
ReplyDeleteBut again, it doesn't have the award sewn up yet, and ten nominees coupled with instant-runoff voting means it will probably need to win the majority of "second-place votes" to win. And can you imagine an Academy voter blithely putting down "Avatar" as her SECOND choice? Either you want the film to win everything or you think it's a piece of shit. Either "Avatar" takes 50 percent of the first-place votes from the start, or it will need to fight for every vote it takes to put it over the top. I still think "Inglourious Basterds" wins, since with Supporting Actor and Adapted Screenplay, it would have the two awards that seem to be the minimum necessary to win BP. There's also the very likely possibility that either a) James Cameron wins Best Director and the film doesn't win BP, or (most likely) b) Best Director goes to Tarantino or Bigelow and "Avatar" *can't* win. (For without Best Director, "Avatar" would be the first film in more than 50 years to win the top award without winning a single other major award.)
I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but the folks at the Academy saw "Avatar" coming down the pipeline. They knew it stood to be the highest-grossing film ever, and that while it probably wouldn't be a four-star movie, its technological accomplishments put a special responsibility on the Academy to recognize it (a responsibility that, again, I don't have a huge problem with). I would not be at all surprised if the innovation of ten best picture nominees wasn't tailor-made to ensure that "Avatar" didn't just run away with Best Picture without other films putting up a fight.
And for what it's worth, I like having ten Best Picture nominees. "The Blind Side" probably doesn't belong in there, but there are much more embarrassing ways this could have gone wrong. (You had "Star Trek" picked, which would have been more respectable in my book...) "District 9" was a surprise, because everyone was expecting "Invictus," but its nomination proves that the academy haven't *just* gone ga-ga over gushy space opera. In a way, this helps us get into the Academy voters' heads, and it exposes something insiders have known for a while: the runners-up for Best Picture are the runners-up for EVERYTHING. (There are Academy insiders who swear "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," with no nominations, was the No. 6 runner-up for all major awards in 2005.) And besides, anything that gets "A Serious Man" nominated is alright in my book.
I doubt the folks at the Academy knew that this film was going to be the highest grossing film ever. I remember of a few months ago, the ridicule and incredulousness that Cameron faced for his Smurf rendition of Dances with Wolves. What people knew ahead of time was the recycled plot and ridiculous blue people, what caught many off guard and what made this movie worth seeing was the effectiveness of Cameron's use of 3-D technology and its contribution to the excellent execution of traditional storytelling
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